Humans are creatures of habits and programmers… well, even more! Working remotely, I spent lots of hours interacting with people using a keyboard:
https://giphy.com/gifs/EtB1yylKGGAUg/html5
Not like that! I mean typing! Nowadays, typing emotions is a common thing: we use emojis. They are everywhere: Slack and Facebook have them. Not Twitter (Yeah, I know! I just can’t get over it!”).
You simply write 🙂 and you get a nice smiling face (Rocket science, eh, Twitter?)
Slack pushed it even more. They have a ton of icons and you can even add yours, but… BUT the keywords to trigger the icon replacement must start and end with “ : “, like :+1:, :-1:, :sweat:. It gets worse if you prefer other skin colors: :+1::skin-tone-5:.
I continuously type +1 or -_-’ and I want them to be translated in emoji, Lucky me, OSX has a text replacement feature:
System Preferences -> Language & Region -> Keyboard preferences -> Text
Once you have your favorite ASCII emoticons ready to be replaced, you go to Slack and enable the Text Replacement:
Notes
With the same approach, you can even easily censor yourself, replacing words like f*ck, sh*t and so on 🙂
And now, go to setup some office prank for your colleagues >:)
PS
Fellas at https://medium.com/developers, we could use some emoji replacement here, too 😉